No future without struggle for socialism

Published May 19, 2006 10:21 PM

Larry Holmes

WW photo

We have to be clear about what is historically necessary and how our role
will be decisive, because while our comrades are fighting imperialism around the
world, they are waiting for us to kick the shit out of imperialism here.

If we all do our job, we’ll look back on these opening years of the
21st century as the rebirth of the world struggle for socialism, the second
phase. The first phase was interrupted by reaction, by counterrevolution.

We must convince this generation of revolutionaries, potential
revolutionaries and all those who once were dedicated to the good fight for a
new world, that there is no future without the struggle for socialism. We have
to have this vision, and we cannot put it off.

In Hugo Chavez’s
speech to the World Social Forum late last year, he urged that Earth is in
danger. If we don’t get to socialism soon we may lose the planet.

We don’t have our head in the clouds. We are in the day-to-day
struggle. We are for every gain the workers can win-the right to a coffee break,
a union, a street lamp. These things are important. But we never forget the
vision-to take back the world from the imperialists.

We didn’t
decide to put Che Guevara on the conference banner just to be in vogue. He is
the most important internationalist of the last half-century. He was so obses
sed with the necessity of world revolution that he literally tried to go around
and instigate it, in Africa, in Vietnam, in Latin America.

Our sisters
and brothers in the Middle East are kicking some butt, from Palestine to Baghdad
and Tehran. We don’t judge the masses [there]. There’s a great
history and tradition of revolutionary working class parties and national
liberation movements. And if their influence is not what it was, it’s
because agents and cronies of U.S. imperialism have smashed those organizations.
But they will build themselves up.

The best thing for us to be obsessed
and concerned with is the development of the working class in our country.
That’s what the people of the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa
are waiting for.

May Day was welcome, good news to them. I submit that May
Day 2006 in this country was a huge defeat for U.S. imperialism. For decades
U.S. imperialism has done everything possible to smash May Day, international
workers day, in the country of its origin. Uh oh, it’s back. There
haven’t been so many people in Union Square since they protested the
execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953.

And not only did we have May Day, we
had the closest thing that the working class of this country has ever had to a
general strike. Millions of workers. Every industry affected. A political strike
against the government.

And they tried to stop this May Day too. The
bourgeoisie spread rumors of repression, mostly false.

Even some labor
leaders went against it, and they should be ashamed. Hopefully, they’ll
think and say, “This helps workers, doesn’t hurt them. What am I
thinking?”

It’s important to point out that while the
struggle against racist legislation was the impetus behind this, this was not
just the undocumented working class. This was their families who are workers,
predominantly Latin@ but also Asian and African, this was a reflection of what
the working class looks like.

Imperialist globalization has brought
workers together. It has brought May Day back to the U.S. It has brought back
class consciousness and militant traditions. And we better consider it and
explain it as a wake-up call. If you have doubted that there could be any
qualitative political change, look at May Day.

It just goes to show that
you don’t have to depend on the bourgeois parties. Imagine if we had a
general strike over what they’re trying to do to Delphi workers, or around
national health insurance, or to stop the war. All of those things, all of a
sudden are less nutty, because look what the immigrants did.

Can the May
Day uprising spread to those sectors of the working class that were not a part
of it? Yes, it will. But the struggle of the undocumented for their rights has
to be unconditionally supported. We must fight the racism, the fear, the
chauvinism.

There’s talk of a million immigrant march in September,
and if they can get together with the Black movement and combine justice for
Katrina, whoa. This struggle can’t reach its maximum potential without the
decisive participation of workers of all nationalities, and trade
unionists.

Black and brown unity is decisive. We know that because the
bourgeois mouthpieces are trying to create tension between Latin@ and African
American workers.

We live in the prison house of nations. This is the
center of oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, of every kind of ugly division
that imperialism spawns. We would be naïve to think that it doesn’t
have its impact in the movement.

We have to fight it everyday.

—Larry Holmes, Secretariat,WWP; Troops Out Now Coalition leader

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